Social media is currently used to communicate pandemic education, as I noted in 17 May entry. It is also being used to persuade individuals to alter their behavior regarding COVID-19. Some of the posts mentioned on 17 May serve both purposes. The mechanics of proper hand washing or announcements of government aid...  Read this >>

Most Americans know about the president’s COVID task force, a body set up by President Trump to provide Americans with timely advice about the pandemic and to make decisions about a response. It was supposed to be headed by Vice President Pence, but Trump clearly dominates. Yet, very few people know about my university’s “task force&rdq...  Read this >>

Tomorrow, Monday, 01 June, the British government will start easing the lockdown. In British society, there has been a heated debate about the pros and cons of this step. Does it come too soon? Is it just right? Should the lockdown continue? Many people, particularly parents, think it is too soon to ease the lockdown and reopen schools and nurseries. Ther...  Read this >>

I work as an invigilator during exam periods at my University. I help students take an exam smoothly without disturbances. I provide them with information and guidance, extra papers and stationeries while they’re taking the exam. One of my duties is to prevent students from committing immoral behaviour at an exam site, i.e. cheating. We provide stud...  Read this >>

This is the last of my three-part posts on neoliberalism, poverty and COVID. I want to look at some of the already emerging secondary and downstream effects of COVID on the global poor, and will do so towards the back end of today’s long post. The secondary impacts of COVID on poverty will mainly be from the economic fallout of the pandemic, and ind...  Read this >>

Let’s have a look at some of the different subjects constructed by this horribly cruel and incompetent UK government amidst this crisis: The Heroic Worker: Without a reliable system of protecting, testing and contact tracing in place, the first step of ‘reopening the economy’ has been to sacrifice blue collar workers and send them back ...  Read this >>

One effect of the pandemic lockdown is that I am spending a lot longer in my study at home than I used to. With my office at work now out of bounds (and having only been able to snatch about 20 monographs and two piles of papers before the building was closed), I began to take more notice of the many books on my study shelves that I had not read in (gulp!...  Read this >>

I am pretty excited today! I am feeling hopeful and happier than in previous days. Well, I also have many things that concerned me about my country's erratic behavior toward COVID-19. Last week, a ministerial meeting video was released, and it seems that many (many) issues came out. To name a few:  the Ministry of Environment said that the governm...  Read this >>

Two Limericks   There once was a man on a mission To test his eyes with precision He went for a drive With his kid and his wife And found he had truly no vision   To a man who was nobody's vassal Quarantine seemed a right hassle Took his family Drove across the country All else is just Barney Castle   By now I think that we ar...  Read this >>

In these bizarre days, I sometimes feel like a character in a novel. Not necessarily a surreal novel, not fantasy and not magic realism. Rather like one of these anonymous characters in one of José Saramago’s abstract, hypothetical and almost academic novels. Most of Saramago’s novels begin with an abstract thought experiment from whic...  Read this >>

It is Tuesday. I should maybe be feeling refreshed but the UK's three day Spring 'bank holiday' weekend that just past was hijacked by a news story which became quite engrossing. The story 'broke' on Friday and is about a 500 mile round trip from London to Durham and back made by Number 10 Special Advisor Dominic Cummings during the British 'lockdown'. Th...  Read this >>

I am perplexed by the emphasis the Prime Minister put on reopening car showrooms in his last briefing. Many people are facing financial hardship and precarity because of covid and because of the consequences of the government's mismanagement of this crisis. I am therefore wondering if buying a new car is really the top priority on people's minds right now...  Read this >>

In the pages of the Jacobin and elsewhere, the historian and social critic Mike Davis has addressed the societal problems associated with COVID-19, and the ways in which governments and social movements should try to respond to them. Accurately enough, Davis describes the current public health crisis as a monster fuelled by capitalism. The conservative co...  Read this >>

I’m having a COVANGRY day and don’t even know where to start. The age of populism is also the age of stupidity and moral failure, it seems perfectly clear. As official COVID-related deaths in the USA tip toward the 100,000 mark, the POTUS chose this moment to go golfing. Brazil is also in real dangerous waters and sees a President respond to t...  Read this >>

More and more people died of coronavirus or other diseases nowadays. In Indonesia, Brazil, United States, around the world. Our relatives, friends, someone who are connected to us. This is just something that, lately these days, happens everyday and considered as "normal".  A couple of days ago, I did usual phone call with my family in Banjarmasin, ...  Read this >>

Like everyone else, I’ve changed the way I buy my food since the lockdown began. I’ve always tried to buy local, from smaller shops and the farmers’ market. Still, I went to the supermarket a fair bit too, for quick shops when I was in a hurry or for brands I couldn’t get locally. A couple of things stopped me cutting out the supe...  Read this >>

Tonight at dinner, my husband, two daughters, and I went through what now has become the usual evening conversation about politics and COVID. (We all read and think too much.) It was a day or two after President Trump visited Ford Motor Company in Detroit, a city hard-hit by the virus in a state (Michigan) where people with guns have marched on the capita...  Read this >>

Disclaimer: This is a post full of banalities and complaining I am exhausted, I am tired, and, above all, I am upset that I feel this way. Right now, even the simplest decision seems complicated to me and this makes my everyday life cumbersome. Here are a few hits from this week: Grocery shopping: Since March, we only go grocery shopping once a week t...  Read this >>

"So, we have our unhealthy lifestyles, we eat unhealthy dishes, we smoke, we don’t do sport and we don’t attend screening programs either." There are thousands of excellent public health experts on ethnic minority and migrant health, however, there is something crucial most of them lack. It is the personal experience. Being a public health p...  Read this >>

I came to the UK almost two years ago, and found it interesting that UK media outlets had talked about nothing other than Brexit. It seemed that they were less concerned about other issues such as welfare, education, immigration, unemployment, and crimes. These issues were otherwise discussed in terms of the influence Brexit had on them. These issues see...  Read this >>

Today I have been thinking about predictions, or more precisely why we are so bad at them. Coming to terms with how the pandemic may or may not change the world around us requires us to extrapolate and predict, even when events are moving so rapidly that their direction is almost impossible to gauge from our limited point in time and space. The reason I ...  Read this >>

Since the beginning of the pandemic and its global spread, I have come across an abundance of articles, passionately announcing that this historic event will change everything; that it will change how we work and live; that it will even change our attitude towards climate change and make us more aware of global threats and the necessity to find together a...  Read this >>

Two Haiku (all words White House Remarks, April 23rd, 2020)   We hit the body just very powerful light it kills it in one.   The disinfectant by injection inside almost a cleaning.   Here is another installment of abbreviated notes from key White House press conferences - this conference dated 23.4.2020 is already beyond infamous...  Read this >>

It has been a bad week... personally, professionally, epidemiologically... Chile is now entering the full collapse period of the epidemic. It could have been averted. (Male) Egos made it impossible. Now we are running in circles with no possibility of controlling the epidemic in the good old fashion way: test, trace, isolate. We public health scholars ge...  Read this >>

It seems every work related email begins with a single line asking how I am doing, and if I am well. I always reply with a variant of 'fine, and you?' It almost seems rude now to write an email without adding the 'hope you are doing well under these difficult circumstances' salutation. ... but how am I doing? Although I am asked this question on a regula...  Read this >>

It was a tough day. Today I had two meetings about two relevant types of research: one about a large project with the Brazilian Ministry of Health on obesity and multilateralism, the other about noncommunicable disease risk factors with our Latin American partners (among them Peru, Argentina, Mexico, and Costa Rica). Then, I realized how technology had en...  Read this >>

I start my day of working in a rota on and off with the two year old. Endless snacks, stories and TV, mixed with bouts of work. It is a crazy way to work, but has been the pattern for nearly 3 months. Most of the time it is just impossible and frustrating. When I do get to it, I am tired from watching the live feed of the World Health Assembly (WHA) much ...  Read this >>

Yesterday the oil and gas lobby and its supporting accounts lit up Newfoundland and Labrador Twitter with excited optimism. Despite International Energy Agency (IEA) pessimism in its May report on oil, a series of reports in Reuters and Bloomberg seemed to be saying that global oil demand (especially in China and India) was returning to old levels of cons...  Read this >>

Last month I wrote a short piece for a local online news site on COVID-19 as a tutorial level for the various global threats we face. I followed this up with an extended blog version. Both of these pieces were inspired by a course I teach - The Global Politics of the End of the World - where I explore the material threats we face. The question that haunte...  Read this >>

This second post on neoliberalism and the vectors of poverty and inequality will focus on the impact of COVID on some LMIC countries and specific populations such as slum dwellers. I’m going to confine analysis to just two countries badly hit, Ecuador and Brazil. First, let me start out by saying that, with a sadly ever-growing number of exceptions...  Read this >>

                What with trolls, bots, and presidential tweets, it is easy to overlook the positive – as opposed to obviously negative -- ways social media is being used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media itself is a neutral tool, neither good nor bad but for the use...  Read this >>

Perhaps the most obvious impact of the lock-down is that we’re all forced to be at home. This seems, for many people, a difficult thing – to actually have to live in the place we ‘live’ in. Why has that become so strange and challenging? I think one reason is that, just as our lives have become a means to the end of collecting eno...  Read this >>

The one thing this pandemic has taught us is the value and the importance of international cooperation. Since COVID-19 has hit the world, states have seemed to have their own way in containing the virus and protecting their citizens. Amid states’ infdependent movements, there are two global efforts for the development of vaccines and treatments for ...  Read this >>

YeonJu Chung Reflective Essay POLS 2100   Managing the Covid-19 Pandemic as a friend, student, and a volunteer worker   Prelude: Friend   As the corona virus began to spread more and more around the world, I heard about it from a friend who was studying in New York, USA. As a confirmatory occurred in New York, my friend said the ro...  Read this >>

Living with COVID-19 these days            The first time when the COVID-19 came out was around in February. I was planning to go to the beach, Sokcho in South Korea, which was 2 hours away from the city where I lived. Back then, I was excitedly planning for a short trip with my college friends, such as which bus to book, wh...  Read this >>

I am just watching a WHO press conference on my phone, via twitter - I did not know that this was even possible until now. But being interested in the use of digital technology within the field of global health, I thought that I'd give it a go (along with Instagram, which is an entirely different story). Anyway, at first I was really impressed with the wh...  Read this >>

The frustrations of comparative US cases during Covid: Michigan, Iowa, Utah   The United States has become a bit of a laughingstock internationally. Perhaps it always has been, but its collective response to the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have turned that laughter into a mixture of horror, scorn, and pity. The US has as of this writing the most de...  Read this >>

In January 2020, Susan Sell and myself edited and published a Special Issue of the Review of International Political Economy (or RIPE), on the global political economies of health. Our introduction to the collection had the pretty pompous title – ‘Health under Capitalism: a global political economy of structural pathogenesis’. Basically,...  Read this >>

England has been on lockdown since late March. Contrary to those who argue that UK’s response to COVID-19 was too soft, the lockdown has been harsh, indiscriminate, and, on occasion, it has infringed upon individual liberties. Boris Johnson’s much-anticipated speech last Sunday did not change much. The ‘baby steps’ described toward...  Read this >>

Like many these days, I have been wondering about the (German) care system, about care infrastructures and what it means that across the world, care homes appear to be the place where most COVID related deaths arise. As Owain Williams has outlined in this blog before, moving past this pandemic means understanding that the aged care system in many nations ...  Read this >>

I felt quite a bit of trepidation ahead of writing my first post: Do I write something personal and profound? Searing and insightful political analysis? (Whether I could execute either of these is another matter entirely). In the end, I’ve settled on something in between as I realised that the trepidation I felt is caused precisely by my personal si...  Read this >>

         Living in South Korea in 2020, feels very safe, and ordinary, but there are certainly changes in our daily lives such as wearing masks everywhere and working in home. Koreans have been unfortunate situations hearing hundreds of patients every day, but we soon settled it down with efforts of all citizen...  Read this >>

Confusion reigns in some of the countries worst hit by COVID. The UK, the US and Brazil are now in disarray with confused messaging and the real disintegration of functioning political systems. In all three countries, state-level governments, devolved nations and cities are now following their own paths as the messages grows more confused and leadership i...  Read this >>

This first appeared on the Duck of Minerva website   History sometimes has a way of rearing its ugly head repeatedly. The COVID-19 pandemic is something few people have ever seen, but it is not new in history. Neither is the fragmented nor uneven and missing policy responses to it. How political leaders respond during the initial stages of pandemic...  Read this >>

In a previous diary entry, written while Boris Johnson was in Intensive Care, I (mildly) regretted an earlier post in which I had referred to his reputation for laziness and incompetence. Ever since his recovery, I have regretted my regret. Tonight’s speech, in which Johnson supposedly set out the new lockdown rules for the UK, has once again shown ...  Read this >>

            It is, of all things, a Burger King commercial that sums the idea up nicely: we should all become “couch po-ta-triots.” It is now our patriotic duty to #stay home/save lives. That perspective of patriotism is hypocritical and discouraging when the United States has, for at leas...  Read this >>

It feels as if things are slipping away more and more, especially since last weekend. Way more people, at least on my street, are out and about now, even though we are still officially on the same lock-down as the last 7 or so weeks. Way more people are expressing frustration with the lock-down. More cars are on the road, more people are in the parks and ...  Read this >>

For those after a short read, please look away now. In this second part of my post about COVID, aged care and neoliberalism (see May 5 for part one) I want to give focus to the consequences of marketisation in the COVID crisis. Having so far detailed the withdrawal and reformulation of government from a privatized and increasingly financialised long-term...  Read this >>

Chaehee Kim Monthly Thoughts Regarding COVID-19 from December 2019 to April 2020 2019 December Around Mid-December, I first heard the news about Coronavirus that was spreading in Wuhan, China. At that time, people did not call it as Coronavirus. The news said that people are suffering from pneumonia in Wuhan. I did not think it would become pandemic. ...  Read this >>

The first time when the COVID-19 came out was around in February. I was planning to go to the beach, Sokcho in South Korea, which was 2 hours away from the city where I lived. Back then, I was excitedly planning for a short trip with my college friends, such as which bus to book, what to take, what restaurant to go to after arriving in Sokcho, and how man...  Read this >>

This is a brilliant piece on COVID-19 and risk: 'It’s easy to turn on the tap of fear as a motivational force, and much harder to switch it off in the absence of concrete reassurance. But the Government could have foreseen that we would need to resume more normal activity before any medical breakthrough could reduce the risk of Covid-19 to zero. Wh...  Read this >>

There is so much I've been meaning to write about this crisis, but so far everytime I tried, I couldn't put anything down on paper. Thinking about covid confronts me with the magnitude - not just of the pandemic - but of all the failures of our political systems. All that which links together the major ills of the anthropocene, all these connections invad...  Read this >>

After having a self-imposed news holiday, I just had to check in today. I felt as if I was missing out and it was making me anxious.  Having checked I can confirm it was not great. New cases in the USA are now at 20,000 per day and there have been of 71,000 official recorded deaths ascribed to COVID. In this context, May the 5th was a very busy day ...  Read this >>

Yes, I've said it, 'FUCK THE TORIES'. Hold on, let me say that again, and again and again. FUCK THE TORIES, FUCK THE TORIES, FUCK THE TORIES, FUCK THE FUCKING TORIES. Now imagine that written in the shape of a rainbow, different colours with the wonderful words, FUCK THE TORIES flowing through them. That’s what I’ve got in my living room ...  Read this >>

I am doing a PhD on the visuality of epidemics. My focus is on the Ebola epidemic in west Africa but, little surprisingly, since a few months I am pondering a lot about how we visually experience the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading Bill Callahan’s ‘Sensible Politics’ (highly recommended!) got me thinking beyond the two-dimensional image, ask...  Read this >>

Like many people I have direct experience of a family member in long-term aged care etched on my memory. For me it was my grandfather on my father’s side, Tom Williams. He entered care when I was about 11 and remained there for a number of years before dying. The care unit was run by the NHS and local authority in my South Wales Valleys’ homet...  Read this >>

South Korea, where I live, is close to China, the first outbreak of Covid-19. Thus, relatively quickly, the confirmed case of COVID-19 has been spread out. The COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease, and many confirmed cases have come out, but most of the people say South Korea has responded well in the early stages and is making a social-distant system ...  Read this >>

Over the past week(s) I've been reading through articles, assessments and press statements made by various organisations and individuals over the course of the outbreak. I am now compiling timelines to keep track of what is happening and what has already happened, as the presentation of past events increasingly shifts. Things are also moving at such a fas...  Read this >>

Walking around the place I live (a commuter town in Surrey, England) I'm being laughed at and told to 'calm the fuck down' (amongst other things) for expecting and asking people to social distance. Confrontations are happening on a more than daily basis - because I won’t let people invade my 2 meter protective space without a fight - and it's wearin...  Read this >>

These are some quick thoughts I’ve had as the protests against the quarantine pick up. During this pandemic, we have watched carefully as dictators and pseudo-democrats have sought to use the pandemic as a way to tighten their grips over power in their countries. These are not unexpected as leaders throughout history have used crises as a way to jus...  Read this >>

As with many of the commentators on Twitter, social media and on this site, I am having what could be described an angry day (a COVANGRY day as someone put it recently), one of many over the last few months. For many of us involved in Global Health, from whatever disciplinary take, these days bubble up and you just can’t help but seethe at the waste...  Read this >>

When the lockdown started, one of my friends emailed me to ask if I am OK. I wasn't sure if I was OK or not. Everything had changed rapidly, and there were not many things that I was sure of. I was busy figuring out what was happening; however, it was not easy because situations changed very often. I was experiencing many ups and downs in a day, however, ...  Read this >>

We are usually told that state power lies in its capacity to provide security. The more capability a state have to secure the state interest, a more powerful they are. The debate is of course more complex than that. There are complex theorising as to what constitute state power, how the states are categorised into a particular hierarchy (i.e. Great, Major...  Read this >>

A new month has come, but an ongoing challenge is still here: coronavirus. While I try to keep my mental health, Brazilian politics goes very, very bad. At first, our Ministry of Health left the office. The main reason lies in his decisions and recommendations that were not aligned with President's expectations. Our President is hardly committed to the en...  Read this >>

One of my personal battles in lockdown is trying not to watch Trump’s daily briefings, which I have about a 50% success rate with. A first world problem I know. It is a bit like watching an episode of Faulty Towers between your fingers, cringing as Basil spirals out of control after starting out with some petty lie or misunderstanding, a nose-diving...  Read this >>

The Swedish health minister, Lena Hallengren, has opined that there must be an international investigation "to conduct to gain knowledge about the origin and spread of the coronavirus," reported the South China Morning Post. Hallengren has mentioned its foundation on a universal welfare state's health care system. This is an understandble point of view, a...  Read this >>

With their permission, I share below two student responses to the course activities mentioned in my April 26 entry Teaching the Pandemic We’re Living Through. Excerpt from a reflective essay on course content, with this section about studying global health governance and COVID-19: Even though we were actively living and learning about complicated,...  Read this >>